How To Achieve Quality Sound Mixes In A Small Church with Kade Young

Kade Young is the founder of the highly polished and technical Collaborate Worship where he helps other worship leaders learn from his twelve years’ experience. Kade drops by to collaborate on sound mixing ideas, so that your church can step-up your sound experience.

3 Instant Takeaways

What are the core tenets of good sound design? Kade says the most important thing is to understand what’s going on. If you’re not techie enough to understand your sound equipment, don’t mess with the defaults. Know the basics of EQ filters before you arbitrarily play with the settings. Hear some basic advice — including how to set your gain levels properly on every channel — in the podcast. Read more about EQ and gain settings on Kade’s site here here and here.

Own your position as a sound tech. Sound techs should feel free to mix autonomously. It’s a craft of its own. But you should also be willing to accept input from the worship leader, who might understand nuances of the music in a different way. Sometimes sound issues aren’t even problems at your end -– it’s an instrument or mic problem from stage.

What gear does Kade recommend? For mics he suggests the Shure SM58, the Sennheiser e835, or the Electro-Voice ND767A. For soundboards, he’s a big fan of the Behringer X32 Digital Mixer. He recommends this even if it’s more expensive than an analog board because you get way more features, compression and built-in effects. Today’s digital technology is vastly improved over a few years ago and you won’t lose any sound quality.

Free Bonus: Click here to download The iPhone Church Photography Case Study – learn to shoot stunning photos for your church with only your phone